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Carlo Maria Giulini is dead
Jun. 16th, 2005 07:44 amMusicians, as a whole, are detestable people. It is strange that this great art, this greatest of all arts, born from religious worship and bearing its imprint in its ability to manifest spiritual life more nakedly than any other, should produce, as interpreters, such a bunch of egomaniacs, failures, cranks, and hypocrites; such as the legendary conductor who used to literally chase young women around the table. You have heard stories about pop musicians, but they are scarcely the only or even the worst ones; few people are as foul-mouthed, as self-righteous, as intolerant of diversity or disagreement, as many classical musicians I have known.
Conductor Carlo Maria Giulini would have been extraordinary in any professional milieu; in classical music, he was a living denial of impossibility. He was more than a good man; he left, on awed and shaken orchestras and on soloists jolted for a minute out of their egotism, the impression of a living saint, of a moral level that ordinary men can imagine and love but hardly reach. Too many people, from too many different viewpoints, have said the same thing, for it not to be true. A conductor cannot afford to be modest - their job is to master seventy-odd musical egos, and anything but arrogant confidence would be the death of them. At best you get the Uriah Heepish sentimentality of a certain famous German exile, behind which lay both greed and insensitivity. But Giulini was modest; and in spite of that, he was constantly, unbrokenly successful with all his orchestras. He was a southern Italian from my mother's part of the world, in fact he looked a bit like my grandfather; but he was utterly untypical of Italian musicians, brought up on Verdi and Rossini, in not making drama his primary goal. As a musician, he had what can be seen as a major flaw, which was his increasing predilection for slow tempi; yet that was as much to do with his sense of music as primarily a spiritual experience as with any mere idiosyncrasy. It did not prevent many of his Verdi performances from being epoch-making.
He had an immensely long career and died, as many conductors do, at a very advanced age. And that being the case, one has to wonder whether this is, as we are apt to feel, really a sad occasion. It is, of course, for us, who are deprived for the rest of our lives of such a wonderful presence; and yet, unlike many saints, he has left behind a body of work that will live on in this world. But he knew, and people like him live to remind us, that this world is not our home or our final destination; and as he has now, as I hope and believe, gone home for ever, we should rather be glad and grateful for someone who shows before God all that a man can be. As Christians, we are under obligation to pray for the souls of the dead and to believe that God alone is good; yet we have always recognized as well that certain men and women walk on this Earth with a special light, a closer experience of God and His Goodness than we usually do; and we have always paid respect and admiration to such individuals, called them saints, and resorted to them, before and after death, for help from their goodness; and I hope and believe that Carlo Maria Giulini was one such man. May he rest in peace, and awaken in the light.
Conductor Carlo Maria Giulini would have been extraordinary in any professional milieu; in classical music, he was a living denial of impossibility. He was more than a good man; he left, on awed and shaken orchestras and on soloists jolted for a minute out of their egotism, the impression of a living saint, of a moral level that ordinary men can imagine and love but hardly reach. Too many people, from too many different viewpoints, have said the same thing, for it not to be true. A conductor cannot afford to be modest - their job is to master seventy-odd musical egos, and anything but arrogant confidence would be the death of them. At best you get the Uriah Heepish sentimentality of a certain famous German exile, behind which lay both greed and insensitivity. But Giulini was modest; and in spite of that, he was constantly, unbrokenly successful with all his orchestras. He was a southern Italian from my mother's part of the world, in fact he looked a bit like my grandfather; but he was utterly untypical of Italian musicians, brought up on Verdi and Rossini, in not making drama his primary goal. As a musician, he had what can be seen as a major flaw, which was his increasing predilection for slow tempi; yet that was as much to do with his sense of music as primarily a spiritual experience as with any mere idiosyncrasy. It did not prevent many of his Verdi performances from being epoch-making.
He had an immensely long career and died, as many conductors do, at a very advanced age. And that being the case, one has to wonder whether this is, as we are apt to feel, really a sad occasion. It is, of course, for us, who are deprived for the rest of our lives of such a wonderful presence; and yet, unlike many saints, he has left behind a body of work that will live on in this world. But he knew, and people like him live to remind us, that this world is not our home or our final destination; and as he has now, as I hope and believe, gone home for ever, we should rather be glad and grateful for someone who shows before God all that a man can be. As Christians, we are under obligation to pray for the souls of the dead and to believe that God alone is good; yet we have always recognized as well that certain men and women walk on this Earth with a special light, a closer experience of God and His Goodness than we usually do; and we have always paid respect and admiration to such individuals, called them saints, and resorted to them, before and after death, for help from their goodness; and I hope and believe that Carlo Maria Giulini was one such man. May he rest in peace, and awaken in the light.
